Food websites can be a bit bland like most of the recipes contained within, but Delicious Recipes aims to deliver way more than just another recipe website.

Adrian

Delicious Recipes

Any room for another roast potato?

You may ask the question as it would appear the internet is flooded with food recipe websites, and you’d be right – it is.

Unless of course the concept was slightly different, would that not allow room for another?

How about one that actually considers all the questions we keep asking ourselves about cooking, such as, how do they make that? Why does my version of this dish never tastes as good as the ones you get from the takeaway? Why can’t I get my crackling to be as good as his? How does he get his roast potatoes to taste so good? How do you make egg fried rice?

Other useful questions people have include how do you cook for vegans? What can or can’t a coeliac eat? How can I cook a dinner party for 20 guests without spending all my time in the kitchen?

Understanding the science of food goes a long way to producing amazing food. Being organised helps deliver it and knowing the shortcuts can keep you from being in the kitchen all the time.

Another difference with the Delicious Recipes website, and this is different, is the ingredients often required to prepare the recipes. We don’t always have every ingredient needed to hand when cooking a spur-of-the-moment meal. The recipes are on the site for normal people with food storage cupboards like most of ours, limited to say the least!

It is a new website, and as with any new site the content is in the very early stages, but it is rapidly building. Once they have a few more contributors on board and have packed the site with more golden nuggets of information, it will be a force to be reckoned with.

How long did the website take to build and how much did it cost?

Although you may not think it, but for the technical amongst you, the Delicious Recipes website is built using WordPress, utilising a few Plugins and some bespoke customisation. The entire project took just over a week from design to development. We used the WP Ultimate Recipe plugin with a few minor modifications to the code coupled with a completely new template for the recipe display. Microdata was inserted into the code to allow for search engines to index the site properly, this was done in line with schema.org’s standards.

As an extra, we have built a social media presence using Facebook and incorporated a signup option on the site so any new recipes or cooking tips posted can be notified to the user base.

A comment system was added to allow feedback regarding each of the recipes and articles which although is interesting for the website owners to read, it is more there for the purpose of the website users to establish a relationship with each other, share experiences and so on.

This would have cost £1800 plus VAT including the graphic design etc. but as this site is of interest to me and I would like to get a food community going, it was done for no charge. I believe we see too much of the usual ‘celebrity’ chefs and there appears to be no more room for anyone else, and for that, we are missing out. So Delicious Recipes will promote the lesser known amongst us wishing for greater choice and better opportunities.

What’s next?

In time, there will be the facility for noteworthy members to upload recipes and a video section for those wishing to watch a recipe or technique being performed rather than read it.

Future additions will include a biography section for contributing members. Some members may have food related businesses, i.e. restaurants, a delicatessen or mobile catering service etc., and we would like to include a section about these businesses particularly if they have something unique to themselves we believe ought to be made known through Delicious Recipes website.